Hill of Grace

by Stephen Orr

  Phil led Nathan up the steps and into an ante-chamber of lederhosen and mock Bavarian dresses, recently finished with lace salvaged from the Kismet shrouds. He found a program, still smelling of ink, and showed Nathan his name, inserted alphabetically beside thirty-seven others who (according to the directions of Frank Fargo, the director) would walk on stage on cue and deliver their box-steps and four-part harmonies in a ‘homely, natural style’.

  Nathan stood back and smiled as Phil, mingling with the rest of the chorus, got laughs by imitating the director. ‘“Here, you, what’s your name, never mind, if I see you upstage from the principals again I’ll have you removed.”’ Continuing, as Nathan examined the props table: fake plastic cakes and yeasts which wouldn’t look out of place in the Apex bakery, artificial flowers and garlands to decorate the inn (again, good enough for the harvest festival), old suitcases for the guests and a dozen beer steins.

  ‘“Your acting is woody,”’ Phil continued, noticing Nathan and dragging him over. ‘Nathan, though, is the real thing, a Barossa Lutheran.’

  Nathan smiled, unsure if he had anything to be proud of. One of the chorus asked, ‘How do we look, authentic?’

  ‘We’re an agricultural community: overalls and workboots. Still, I think, if we returned to Silesia wearing this …’

  ‘Prosit! Ich habe gemutlich,’ one of them smiled, acting with a stein, comfortable with the thought of a plywood inn and corny accents, refusing to consider realities which were still mostly rubble. Nathan shrugged – ‘I have cosy, I don’t think so’ – but Phil had him by the arm, leading him on-stage through sets smelling of Hi Gloss, overlooking the Tyrolean lake of St Wolfgang which, within a few days, would be a sea of fake furs and blue rinses, suits that gents had worn to meet the Governor and christen the children. The rehearsal pianist struggled through Salzkammergut on a clunkety piano in the pit as the palm trees from the Foreign Legion scene were raised and lowered repeatedly in the inn’s lobby. His Imperial Highness, Franz Josef, pencilled on his sideburns as the SM cut cheese under an eerie red light.

  Nathan followed Phil downstairs, lingering outside the female dressing room and descending even further into a chamber of the bizarre: pot-bellied men wearing foundation and blusher, powdering their hair, warming up on scales of less than an octave and adjusting their scrotums in full view. A waiter, fully made up on the top half, naked on the bottom, scratched his pubic hair as his neighbour practised lines in the style of a Gestapo interrogator: ‘“Ve have your room ready, valk this vay …”’

  Phil fetched his costume as Nathan sat down in the corner, feeling more lost than ever, a kid from the country, naive beyond his years. If he tried to fit in it would just be pretending, his theatricality as real as prop yeast. Phil, though, was at home here, able to unleash the bit of him which was always acting. Raising his voice above the din of the dressing room: ‘Quiet … please … thank you … for those of us who care about the craft of acting … I need some input … where should the emphasis be, “I do”, or “I do”.’ Going on to ask how they thought Olivier would handle it, if he ever bothered to get back to the roots of his craft.

  Nathan wandered upstairs and settled into the back row of the theatre with his program. The Davy Clarke Singers present, The Whitehorse Inn, starring Rex Pattison … the principal, a fifty-eight-year-old land surveyor with the Water Board, raised on Die Fledermaus and weaned on Showboat. Closeted in a private dressing room (he’d demanded) of leaking water pipes and steam valves. Busy emoting his character as others were having a good time; chasing the truth of Leopold, the love-sick head waiter, as others were busy chasing laughs.

  Directed by Frank Fargo …

  Formerly Frank Bleschke, an immigrant butcher’s son raised on vaudeville, launching himself on-stage in a frenzy of black face and other people’s lines, but dying a death by whispered mutters from the gods, retiring to the Grace Brother’s suit department and a twilight of amateur theatre. Screaming from the stalls, ‘Act, make us believe you,’ as Nathan slipped back into his chair and smiled, and Rex and his love interest exchanged secrets over a garden wall. ‘“The moon sharpens my desires,”’ Rex said, clutching the script he’d only partially learnt.

  ‘This is a dress rehearsal,’ Frank screamed. ‘When will you have it down?’

  ‘That’s the easy part,’ Rex replied.

  ‘Not in my theatre. You won’t be prompted.’

  ‘Fine.’

  Frank sat down, fuming, as his assistant continued massaging his shoulders. ‘Every year there’s less to work with.’

  Phil, meanwhile, fully done up as a bridegroom, had locked himself in the basement lavatory with his pen and notebook: High baritone seeks relationship with like-minded … None of the profundity or poetry of the library toilets, affirming his belief that the theatrically bent were all trivial by nature, substituting the real for the imagined, one-liners for anything remotely spiritual.

  The SM came onto the intercom. ‘Bride and bridegroom, one minute.’ Phil fumbled with an unfamiliar fly as he tripped up steps, knocking over a pile of fake rifles and searching for his bride in a small sea of hotel guests. ‘Here.’ He found her deriding him in front of her friends, arms crossed, frumpy. He dragged her on-stage like a reluctant heifer as he tried to stare longingly into her eyes.

  Frank ran up onto the stage. ‘Late.’

  Deidre, the intended, was quick to point the finger. ‘I was there waiting. He was off God knows where.’

  Phil dropped his hands. ‘I made it.’

  Frank. ‘Late.’

  They all looked at the hotel staff, lined up in anticipation, as the terrified pianist vamped. ‘Quiet!’ Frank screamed, and she stopped. ‘You’ve been late every time,’ he continued, staring Phil down. ‘We’ll just have to replace you.’

  ‘Me?’ Phil imitated Frank, pointing out Rex and his overweight love interest. ‘Woody, I’ve seen better waiters …

  ’ Frank called down to his assistant. ‘What’s this fellow’s name?’

  Phil stepped forward. ‘Drummond, of the Kilburn Drummonds.

  Heard of us?’

  Frank returned to him. ‘If you’re late one more time you’re out.’

  Phil breathed deeply. ‘We are volunteers you know.’

  ‘Continue!’

  Method acting in the extreme. Phil returned to Deidre, and the deep (empty) wells which were her eyes. They walked towards Rex, the head waiter, who asked a series of questions: double bed? facing west? breakfast? – to which they muttered their famous line. After a few moments of low comedy, Phil decided to improvise, throwing off his jacket and saying, ‘I don’t know about you, darlin’, but I got the hankerin’.’ Clutching her around the waist as she tried to push him away.

  ‘Please,’ she said, the spell of stage-love forever broken. Frank was up on the stage in a moment, handing Phil his jacket and telling him to get changed. ‘Come back when you want to take it seriously.’ Taking a stray spot and calling down to his assistant for a suitable replacement.

  The chorus was marched on en masse, each pretending to be interested in market stalls of plastic mettwurst and azaleas. They suddenly came together on cue, sucked centre stage like water down a drain, to waltz, banging up against each other and singing as hotel guests waved from windows and a costume donkey got laughs for all the wrong reasons.

  Nathan, still patiently sitting in the back row, couldn’t help but smile as Frank approached him and asked, ‘Who are you?’

  ‘The bridegroom’s friend.’

  Thrown out of the first theatre he’d ever been into.

  He waited for Phil at the stage door of a thousand borrowed lines. They walked to the station along the path behind Government House, the sound of The Chordettes’ Mr Sandman drifting down from the vice-regal digs. Phil ditched his script over the fence and said, ‘Just like Rex: dead-beats in costume.’

  They crossed King William Road, the syncopations of Joe Aronson still wafting across the Torrens and over th
e lawns of Elder Park. Phil said, ‘Is there any Australian theatre?’ but the sounds of Ellington’s Giddybug Gallop seemed to suggest otherwise. He laughed, continuing extemporaneously, ‘Is there any Australian theatre, or, is there any Australian theatre?’

  Platform eight, ten fifteen, the man in blue resting on a stool, Phil with his head out of the Brill’s window as they passed Dudley Park Cemetery with its cracking memorial wall. ‘I do!’

  The driver stopped at Islington to come back and quieten them down. The rail-yards were oblivious to the night, steam and diesel refusing to sleep, skylights bleeding arc light back into the universe as engineers ground axles to within a thousandth of an inch of their lives.

  Kilburn. Red-brick dreams heavy with lantana, and Rose pulling back the boys’ beds, discovering The Secrets of St John Bosco and sitting down for a giggle, taking it out to the shed to share with Bob who put it down to Phil.

  The boys in the driveway, and then in the lounge of exploding tea and laughter, narrating the farce of theatre Fargo style, Phil describing the bride as a Wagnerian whore (while Rose crunched candied almonds in ignorance) and the director as a cross between Oscar Wilde and Goebbels.

  That Friday, over bangers and mash in the cafeteria, Nathan asked Bob if he could stay down again. Bob channelled gravy through a canyon of finely mashed potato before saying, ‘We don’t mind you staying, only, it’s what your mum and dad want.’

  ‘They wouldn’t care.’ Going on to explain how much work he’d been given at trade school, his cold turned green, heavy, dark clouds, cold mornings and exhaustion.

  ‘How they feel about you skippin’ church?’

  ‘Dad does, if he’s got something on.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  Seeing how Bob understood that skipping church wasn’t a mortal sin, having done it himself for thirty-odd years; seeing how it was just a case of being practical, God understanding that kiddies needed their wheelchairs, citrus its white oil, lawns their weekly trimming. Anyway, there were Rose’s hymns on the radio – passing out through fly-wire which had to be cleaned, windows polished – serenading his near-ripe nectarines with the voices of angels from the Methodist Ladies’ College.

  And this is how it was that Sunday morning: Phil in his bathers, on a towel on the lawn working on a winter tan, Nathan beside him coughing, phrasing and re-phrasing definitions for torque and motive power, converting between pounds and stone, perch and acre, Bob staring through a lattice of gardenia into the sky, secateurs idle, silently mouthing the words to a distant My Redeemer Liveth. Thinking how, if the sky was a jigsaw, no one would ever solve the riddle of the blue bits, cloudless, featureless, stretching out forever – so many disjunct shapes refusing to come together, the poetry of what Handel had achieved in music eluding him.

  William sat at his table, waiting for Bluma to stop coughing, receiving the usual complaints about dampness but explaining how this was neither the time nor the place – their table becoming their altar, demanding the same concentration and focus they gave at Langmeil.

  ‘“And He showed me a pure river of water of life,”’ he read, but Bluma couldn’t take it seriously. Church wasn’t church without Edna’s rusty fingers, without the Stations of the Cross to study or your bum going numb on Arthur’s resurrected pews; without hymns to sing along with or the smells of ladies doused in talc, children slurping Turkey lollies in paper twists or the back of Mary Hicks’ head full of dandruff and God knows whatever else. ‘Coffee?’ she asked, but William just looked up at her with a deadly stare, smoothing his page and continuing.

  Bob finished pruning his six rose bushes, snipping the branches into twigs the size of cigarette butts and raking them into a compost pile of his own design: a border of railway sleepers containing everything from lawn clippings to broken egg shells. Drummond compost, he claimed, was the secret of plants which lived longer than a Bulgarian grandmother. Poking Phil’s stomach with his rake he asked, ‘Haven’t you got exams to learn for?’

  ‘All in good time.’

  ‘When’s the first?’

  ‘Tomorrow. Listen, it’s under control. You squeeze too much in it’s likely to build up and rupture.’ Showing how his head might explode all over Bob’s buffalo grass.

  After lunch they all walked down Carpenter Street towards the station. God had been satisfied (receding back into the box hedge for another week) and creamed corn toasties consumed to the gentle, persistent rhythm of the ABC’s stock report. They walked past a sprawling Federation villa on a hill, Bob raising his hand to greet an old lady sitting on the porch. A goat grazed the un-mowed front lawn, tethered via a chain to a stake.

  ‘Story has it,’ Phil said, as they passed on, ‘she was taken to the Queen Victoria Hospital, heavily pregnant, ready to pop. “Here comes the head,” the surgeon says, but when it emerges …’

  Rose shook her head. ‘People might have stories about us.’

  Phil imitated a goat. ‘No joke. She arrives home with a goat, but no baby.’

  Rose nodded. ‘She lost the baby. The goat was a distraction.’

  Phil laughed. ‘Who gives a goat as a … grieving gift? A dog perhaps.’ He remembered riding around on his ‘bitza’ bike with friends, hiding in the acacias across the road from her, imagining Satan reclining inside with his Best Bets and a lager – calling for her to come in and join him. They’d call out to her, ‘Darling, I’m ready,’ and she’d pack up her knitting and go inside, proving it beyond a doubt. Crawling under her window to listen they’d only hear the hum of an old Singer, but this was just put on to fool the innocents.

  Arriving in Botanic Park they strolled among the crowd, gathered in close around speakers on the backs of trucks or standing high on piles of fruit crates. The speakers were generally done up in tie and jacket, preaching Communism and Temperance on ninety-day permits. Agitating to crowds comfortably numb in a paradise of Kelvinators and melamine kitchens free of garlic and spring rolls. The only ones taking it seriously were a pair of detectives, standing out like rams’ balls as they scribbled in their notebooks: Clyde Cameron, speaking at the Comm. (Soviet) ring. Discussed situation at Port Adelaide. Mentioned how men were organising and being drilled by returned soldiers.

  Beside the Communists were the single-taxers, for whom Bob cheered in support, confiding that most people were unaware of what they paid in indirect taxation. Then there were the Douglas creditors, the Socialist Labour Party and a religious group called the Rationalist Society. But for value for money, most people were drawn to the ladies of the Temperance Union, standing before a large banner of what seemed to be an inebriated pony thrown down at the feet of Christ. The first speaker identified herself only as Mary, Mother of Temperance, and declared that spirits worked by dissolving the very cells of the liver and kidney.

  Phil couldn’t believe it, calling from the back, ‘Where’s the research?’

  ‘Oh, there’s research alright. Visit our headquarters and we’ll supply you with copies of papers from Europe, written by professors of biology and medicine.’

  Bob tripped over a small sign, planted into the grass, announcing Peter Laundy, a pastor who described how the black man was being saved, taught the values of thrift and hard work in a network of missions throughout South Australia and the Northern Territory. Removed from alcoholic mothers (gins sleeping around with multiple partners) so that they might amount to something; given clothes and a bed and a roof over their head, and if they so desired, education to ‘the very highest level’. Briefly reminding the crowd of what their fate might have been otherwise: ‘“For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whore-mongers, and murderers, and idolaters …”’

  Phil nudged Nathan and whispered, ‘Is this why you stay down?’

  Nathan smiled. ‘This one’s a nut.’ But wasn’t so sure, conjuring up William on a soapbox, spewing forth the very same lines.

  Bob looked at Nathan and wondered if it wasn’t time he made contact with William himself. He watched as Phil, nudging Nathan
again, said, ‘Six months with me and you’ll be throwing tomatoes at this fella.’

  Nathan laughed, explaining how this place would bring out the idiots in any group. ‘We’re just like the Baptists,’ he said. ‘Nice sing-along and a prayer.’

  But Bob wasn’t so sure, remembering how his old man had taught him to recognise a Lutheran – walk into a pub and tell a joke, he’ll be the only one not laughing.

  Sitting in the ‘switch-back’, watching teenagers jumping mounds on stripped-back bikes, Bob could still hear Pastor Laundy above the other speakers, more convinced than anyone else of what he was saying. He felt glad, irrespective of the dramas, that they could give Nathan a buffer from the endless devotions and prayers and thanksgiving of the existence he’d described on their walks to work through Kilburn.

  Eventually they bought ice-creams and tuppence of lollies from an old Afghan at the zoo gates and headed back into the city. Phil was left at the university library to study and Nathan stayed with him, content to catch up with the papers.

  In the late afternoon – as the sun started setting west of the Torrens, streaming in the Barr Smith windows through an opaque, yellow film – Nathan left the newspapers behind and wandered aimlessly through rows of shelves pregnant with books. Rows which stretched as far as Arthur’s bottom paddock, the full length of Murray Street, holding more information and facts than he thought the world contained. Row after row, reaching up to a ceiling of spray-on concrete. Six or seven shelves per row, each with a few dozen books – African mystical cults, Micropaleontology, Common Algae of the Great Lakes. And when you were finished on one floor there was another. Silent. Heaters humming. The buzz of fluoros heard above water dripping somewhere. Almost devoid of people. Like the promised End had come and gone. Leaving behind books.

  Each of the thousands of books was a world unto itself. Sitting silently, refusing to reveal any of its secrets unless someone picked it up, read it, and thought about things. Like his father’s Bible. But that was only one book – one in an endless sea of words in which he stood, drowning in the smell of old paper, overwhelmed and overcome as he was sucked under. Each book seemed to contain its own truth and reality, quoting research and references, so that the Bible itself seemed to be lost among them, unable to support its own wild claims.